The Cadalog team just released their latest version of SU Podium 1.6.1 Beta a photo-realistic rendering plug-in for Google SketchUp. Version 1.6.1 includes new wide screen resolution options, support for SketchUp's parallel projection, and also fixes some significant bugs. The update to version 1.6.1 is free for Podium 1.5 or 1.6 users and it works with Google SketchUp 6 or 7, Pro or Free, Windows or Mac.
The SU Podium team has also announced the 4th Podium render contest. The render contest will enable users to produce photo-realistic renderings of any type of Google SketchUp model. The images will be judged on their creativity, originality, and their inspirational qualities. Prizes include a Nikon SLR Digital Camera, Apple iPod Touch, and a Western Digital My Passport portable hard drive. Please visit their contest page for more details.
Rendering plug-in released for SketchUp 7
Tuesday, February 10, 2009 5:40 PM
Get closer to your models in the 3D Warehouse
Monday, February 9, 2009 9:28 AM
If you thought the 3D View for models in Google 3D Warehouse was cool, you will flip for the new "Zoom and Pan". Now you can orbit, zoom in, pan around, and zoom out -- right in the preview window without having to download the model. Use your mouse wheel to roll in for a closer view. Click and hold the Shift key to pan around. You can even change the view when zoomed in! Check out this model of the Eiffel Tower.
- Click on the 3D View button in the preview window.
- Click and hold the left mouse button to swivel your view.
- Now the really cool part...roll your mouse wheel forward to zoom in.
- Click and hold the left mouse button to swivel the zoomed-in view.
- Hold the Shift key and pan up, down, left and right.
Now it's possible to get a clear idea of the model before you decide to download it!
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Calling all designers: Open Architecture Challenge
Thursday, February 5, 2009 5:01 PM
At the SketchUp 3D Basecamp last year, we were fortunate to have Cameron Sinclair (Co-founder, Executive Director and "Eternal Optimist" of Architecture for Humanity) as our keynote speaker. Cameron came to the Googleplex, shared his inspirational work, and motivated everyone to get involved in the Sportables design competition.
To kick off 2009, and to get the creative juices of the SketchUp community flowing again, we've partnered with Architecture for Humanity for the Open Architecture Network Challenge. This year's challenge invites the global design and construction community to collaborate directly with primary and secondary school teachers and students to create safer, healthier, and smarter learning environments.
We're encouraging the SketchUp community - that means you! - to get involved. Safe, healthy, and comfortable environments are vital to learning, and you know how to design them.
Dive into the new Google Earth
Monday, February 2, 2009 12:56 PM
(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)
Didn't Google Earth always have an ocean? Technically, yes, well, sort of. We have always had a big blue expanse and some low-resolution shading to suggest depth. But starting today we have a much more detailed bathymetric map (the ocean floor), so you can actually drop below the surface and explore the nooks and crannies of the seafloor in 3D. While you're there you can explore thousands of data points including videos and images of ocean life, details on the best surf spots, logs of real ocean expeditions, and much more.
We were joined at the Academy by many of the dozens of ocean scientists and advocates who helped make this project a reality: friends from National Geographic, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the US Navy, Scripps Oceanography, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to name just a few. Above all, I would like to acknowledge the work of Dr. Sylvia Earle, who cornered me at a conference three years ago and told me that Google Earth was great but that it wasn't finished (you can read more about that encounter on the Lat Long blog). As much as I hated to admit it, she was right. We on the Google Earth team had been working hard to build a rich 3D map of the world, but we had largely ignored the oceans — two thirds of the planet. Inspired by Sylvia, the team got to work. I hope you are as excited as I am to explore our new Ocean and all of the fascinating stories and images our partners have contributed.
But that's not all we launched today. In addition to Ocean, we introduced new features that we hope will enhance the way people interact with Google Earth and use it to communicate with the world.
- Historical Imagery: Until today, Google Earth displayed only one image of a given place at a given time. With this new feature, you can now move back and forth in time to reveal imagery from years and even decades past, revealing changes over time. Try flying south of San Francisco in Google Earth and turning on the new time slider (click the "clock" icon in the toolbar) to witness the transformation of Silicon Valley from a farming community to the tech capital of the world over the past 50 years or so.
- Touring: One of the key challenges we have faced in developing Google Earth has been making it easier for people to tell stories. People have created wonderful layers to share with the world, but they have often asked for a way to guide others through them. The Touring feature makes it simple to create an easily sharable, narrated, fly-through tour just by clicking the record button and navigating through your tour destinations.
- 3D Mars: This is the latest stop in our virtual tour of the galaxies, made possible by a collaboration with NASA. By selecting "Mars" from the toolbar in Google Earth, you can access a 3D map of the Red Planet featuring the latest high-resolution imagery, 3D terrain, and annotations showing landing sites and lots of other interesting features.
Members of the Google Earth team will be publishing in-depth posts about all of the new features in Google Earth 5.0 on the Lat Long blog all week, so be sure to check back there often. And check out our video tour below.
Case Study: JE Dunn Construction
Thursday, January 29, 2009 12:35 PM
Every project JE Dunn undertakes involves a multitude of moving parts – equipment commissioning, delivery scheduling, construction process coordination, safety planning, and others. From project start through project completion, JE Dunn's Engineering Services Group consisting of in-house designers and engineers strives to ensure building quality.
Necessity is a driving force for innovation. JE Dunn's need to communicate critical information led them to the use of Google SketchUp as a way to deliver information in an efficient, clear and meaningful way. During a project building envelope coordination meeting, the JE Dunn team found it difficult to communicate the complexity and overall project scope to the various teams involved in its construction. The coordination between the teams in the installation process was particularly important as they needed to ensure a water-tight product.
The JE Dunn team turned to SketchUp to virtually mock up complex parts of the project, such as the window installation, into 3D SketchUp models. These 3D models were then presented at the job site enabling the participants to visualize the complexity of the install and understand the sequencing of parts.
For all involved, it was as though a light bulb had been turned on. JE Dunn had used SketchUp to drive a much deeper level of collaboration. The results were an improved way to pro-actively identify and address project issues, generate better solutions as a collective team and, in the end, the production of a high-quality product with stakeholder sign-off.
Coming out of this success, JE Dunn began using SketchUp on other projects, eventually standardizing the way it uses SketchUp to drive quality improvements and lower costs, and even mandating the use of virtual 3D building envelope mock-ups on projects costing $20 million or more.
Today, JE Dunn uses SketchUp throughout the planning and building process. With SketchUp, the company and its subcontractors rapidly prototype and compare design options. Using SketchUp, JE Dunn precisely and efficiently develops building skin installation sequences.
With LayOut, the 2D design documentation feature of SketchUp Pro, JE Dunn is able to combine traditional 2D information with their 3D model information into coherent and useful documentation for teams to use in the field. "LayOut helps formalize how we put the information together. It becomes the glue that brings it all together in an organized fashion" says Rodd Merchant, Vice President of JE Dunn's Rocky Mountain Engineering Services Group.
In combination with Google Earth, the company uses SketchUp to plan project logistics, from fencing to deliveries to construction site traffic flows. It is used to help clients visualize and better understand the status of projects, and how and why clients will have to make temporary adjustments to their workplace and workplace processes in order to accommodate for different phases of construction (for example, when a project will require the temporary closure of one wing of a client’s building).
"The productivity of JE Dunn employees has been impacted by SketchUp as many can now help drive critical processes they wouldn’t have been capable of contributing to in the past" says Merchant. JE Dunn uses SketchUp to communicate and get buy-in from everyone involved on its projects – from property owners, developers and designers to subcontractors, field employees and other stakeholders. “SketchUp is a great visual aid,” says Rodd Merchant. “It’s absolutely made us better, more intelligent builders. We’re more confident and more productive – and just as important, we’re dramatically reducing our risk.”
The complete case study is posted on our website and you can also view additional models from JE Dunn.
Synchro: 4D scheduling software for SketchUp
Wednesday, January 28, 2009 5:38 PM
In terms of representation, the first dimension is characterized by a line. A square is two-dimensional, and an extruded square – a cube – is 3D. So what the heck is 4D? Time.
Synchro Project Constructor is a 4D application that lets you manage a 3D model in time. It's a scheduling tool for visualizing how construction phases will occur. Basically, different parts of your model exist at different points on a timeline, and you can show and hide those parts depending on when you are. Pretty neat.
Even neater is the fact that Synchro Project Constructor is specifically designed to work with SketchUp models. It's a lower-cost, standalone application that anyone with SketchUp can use to add a temporal dimension to their project planning and design.
Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist
3D printing from SketchUp with CADspan: Now even better
Tuesday, January 27, 2009 10:33 PM
You might remember reading about a nifty 3D printing-from-SketchUp plugin called CADspan that we blogged about a few months ago. It would appear that the folks over at LGM (who make CADspan) have been busy since then. They've released a new version of the plugin, and here's some of what's new:
- CADspan is now available for both Windows and Mac
- It now supports SketchUp 7 (which we released in November)
- File processing times are about 10x faster
- The system is much more reliable (hooray for beta testing!)
In related news, there's now a Pro version of CADspan that provides some extra benefits. Check out the Pro page on their websites for all the details.
Advanced 3D Warehouse search in SketchUp 7
Friday, January 23, 2009 10:28 AM
If you are one of the millions of users who has visited the Google 3D Warehouse, you know it's bursting at the seams with models of every imaginable variety from lots of different sources. And it's getting bigger by the hour.
That's great, and all the more reason you should be using Advanced Search to zero-in on just the right model. Accessing this feature from a web-browser is easy - just click on the Advanced Search link. You can refine your search by title, description, author, quantity (single model or collection), and minimum rating. But let's say I'm working in SketchUp and I don't want to stop what I'm doing to launch Firefox.
Okay, not to worry, I can get the same results using SketchUp's built-in mini-browser or better yet, with some practice, using the Component Browser itself. Let's say I'm looking for window treatments for a house I'm designing. I start by selecting the 'Get Models' button, which opens the mini-browser in SketchUp.
If I just type "window" into the search-box, I get about 8,700 models. Now, I have to refine my results by clicking 'Advanced Search'. The simplest qualification I can do is to search for "window" in just the title. That narrows my results to about 850.
It turns out I know the names of a lot of manufacturers that have added their windows to the 3DWH, so I can further narrow by Author. So I can add a company - let's say 'Pella' - under Author. What's really neat is you can run an advanced search and then look at both the results and how the search appears in the search window, as below.
Here are some pointers to help improve search syntax. Also check out this help page
- Field name (for example, "title") followed by a colon : and then term you are looking for... "window." Don't put a space between the colon and the next word.
- To search in multiple fields, you just put a space and repeat for the next qualification. Note also that you can use the key term "is" to search for either a model or a collection, which is pretty cool.
- If your field is more than one word, put quotes around it: e.g., title:"title:"Dropped Placemarks."
- I type in "window" and hit enter (8300 - too many!)
- Put a space and "author:marvin" (ok, cool, that gives 820, but still too much)
- I know I want an open pane, so I put a space and type "title:picture" (we're getting there, 172 results)
- Finally, I know that I want a Casement frame, so I put a space and type "casement"
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Virtually experience the Inauguration
Monday, January 19, 2009 7:52 PM
Earlier today, the Lat Long blog posted some tips about how to use Google Maps to be prepared for tomorrow's Inauguration. Well, for those who aren't able to take in the historic event in person, our own 3D data specialist Nathan Kohrmann put together an amazing model of the Inauguration venue -- the US Capitol Building.
Visit the Google 3D Warehouse where a full scale replica of the 2009 Inaugural Stage is ready to be explored... complete with Barack Obama taking the oath! With Google Earth installed, click "Download Model" to instantly import the stage into a fantastic 3D view, then let the fun begin. Zoom in close to where Barack Obama is standing on the stage to take in the exact view he has or swoop down to the National Mall to see what millions of other spectators are watching.
News.com.au has also put together a great Street View "walking tour" of the Inaugural Parade route, which is another great way to feel like you're a part of the festivities no matter where you are.
Don't let history pass you by!
Friday, January 16, 2009 10:53 AM
Back in November we launched the Ancient Rome in 3D Curriculum Competition alongside a brand-new Google Earth layer highlighting the historic city in breathtaking detail.
Whether you're putting the finishing touches on your submission or have yet to explore the new layer, you still have some time! Just be sure to register and upload your files no later than Monday, February 9th.
Bona Fortuna!
